


Things Left Unsaid

by Soodonim



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Gen, pre-canon unnamed runner three, the major (conspicuously offscreen)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 16:54:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soodonim/pseuds/Soodonim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The standard operating protocol of Abel runners contains more then a few gray areas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Left Unsaid

In retrospect, it's remarkable that no one asks the question sooner. But it's Ten, in his eminent practicality, who asks it.

(It's in the days when he is New Ten, Glasses Ten, Science Ten. _Christ, we're naming them like they're Spice Girls_ Sam laments, though the fact remains that loss is still new enough that they are trying to distinguish replacements, not yet inured to the cycle of loss and re-designation and loss again.)

“When will we begin looting private homes?” he asks, in a lull somewhere around the midpoint of the weekly meeting, as if he's asking for the newest roster. Sam, who'd been scribbling something on a dogeared piece of graph paper that might have been minutes or might have simply been notes to himself for the upcoming week, went the sort of still people usually go when a gun is conspicuously cocked. The parallel held up, as Janine looked to Sam with the same cool curiosity she designated to everything she deemed not worth her agitation, which very plausibly included live firearms. And Eight gave the toothy, intrigued grin she usually reserved for those very same situations.

“. . . pardon?” Sam finally managed, when the pressure of the accumulated looks finally squeezed a word-shaped sound from him.

“I just thought that . . . eventually, we'll need something that we can't find in the shops, or trade for. And when that happens, do we go to abandoned homes?”

“I, er, hadn't-”

“It stands to reason.” Janine speaks over Sam smoothly, as he shoots her a look that is both put out and faintly grateful. “However, we'll be putting off that day as long as we possibly can. No one likes to think of their home being rummaged through.”

“So we'll need protocol for it eventually, is what you mean,” Eight interjects, in her way that would just be pleasantly knowing if it wasn't so smug.

“Eventually,” Janine affirms, shooting her a warning look. And there's a brief moment of silence, before everyone seems to agree that they should move on to the next order of business, before Eight sets about beginning to propose that protocol itself.

Even with New Canton's runners in the field gobbling up resources, it seems like a distant concern.

\- - -

Naturally, it's less than a fortnight before the first mission makes an unapproved detour into a private home. Even as she less-than-stealthily slips off of the camera feed pointed down the designated route, Sam tells himself he probably should have known it would be Three. She's not from the area, really, but her boyfriend is, and they're the sort of stupidly lovey couple who try to do considerate things for one another even when the world is falling down around their ears.

“Oh, I don't know. It seems sort of sweet, doesn't it?” Maxine says over their mugs of much-too-pale tea, blowing off the steam and taking an experimental sip.

“Sweet?” Sam looks a little betrayed that she would even consider that an appropriate word for the situation, slumping back in his chair. “It was massively idiotic!”

“There can be some truth to the cliché about love making you stupid,” she muses, though Sam's got a head of steam up now and doesn't seem like he's about to let it go just so he can start pondering the behavioral effects of romance.

“I mean, how did she even know where he lives? Lived. Whichever, my point is she went right for it, not a missed turn.”

“Maybe he told her. Maybe she asked.” Sam looks earnestly dumbfounded, which only earns a soft laugh and one of those fond don't-tell-me-you're-not-following looks. “They're always together, Sam. People talk about all kinds of things when they're trying to get to know each other better. And if they're talking about how life was before, well, maybe that's therapeutic for them.”

“I'd appreciate it if they could be therapeutic in a way that doesn't send one of my runners within a hundred metres of an unsurveyed red zone, _alone_ ,” he grumbles, in a way that's probably meant to be aggrieved but if anything just sounds a little plaintive. “I mean . . . yeah, I understand, personal effects and all. But you can't just go haring off like that.”

Maxine is quiet for a handful of seconds –not at a loss for words, just thoughtful –before she speaks again, in the tone that always means she's formulating a hypothesis.

“Sam? How many of your runners know the protocols?”

“All of them! Maxine, you know we trai-”

“Really know them,” she interrupts seriously, meeting his eyes. “Really believe in them, that they're there for their own good.”

The answer to that one doesn't come as quickly. There's the head of runners, of course, Seven, who's nearly as no-nonsense as Janine. And there's a few on the roster who'd started with the Major's people, Fourteen and Two some to mind, but even then . . .

“It's probably just all the same sort of lawlessness to them,” she concludes, when Sam's expression begins to shift from uncertainty into something like dismay. “We're still all thinking in practical terms. In a lot of ways, getting your boyfriend a few things from his home is _less_ objectionable than looting a store.”

“What do we do, then? Just . . . wait for people to get used to like as it is?” Sam takes a dejected sip of his tea, glancing at it as if it bears some responsibility for their current predicament. “Push protocol more?”

“Maybe.” Maxine gives a little shrug. “We'll see what the Major says about the report.”

\- - -

By the next runners' meeting, the Major has not said much about the report. Three receives disciplinary actions, of course, a week off the roster and back in training between shifts on guard detail. At the meeting itself, Janine gives everyone a firm reminder about the vital importance of following operator commands and maintaining open lines of communication. But no new protocols come up – not by the meeting, or the meeting after that, or any time in the following month. It fades back into obscurity, buried under the weight of the plague and new arrivals and the steady drumbeat of death after death.

And if anyone thinks, during an idle moment, of how deliberate inaction is itself action, they never speak of it.


End file.
